GIMP

I read a really enlightening story on bounties in GIMP that didn't end as one would hope. However, it seems to be a big learning experience, something the entire community (and not just developers) can learn from. One can also make the parallel here to proprietary software that throwing money at something doesn't fix it. Things could be a lot worse.

This stuff has me really excited about being a Linux user. There's a whole bunch of stuff be working on and being released that I can't wait to play with. First, the big stuff.

Big Releases

GNOME 2.12

The wonderful GNOME folks have released GNOME 2.12. More details can be found in the Prerelease Tour of GNOME 2.12 (local mirror).

Ubuntu Breezy

The Canonical group has released Breezy Badger Preview. You can download from one of their mirrors. Check out a (slightly dated) Ubuntu Breezy Colony 4 screenshot tour or read up on new Ubuntu Breezy features (local mirror). Looking really neat. I'd point out what features I think are killer, but in doing so, I'd just end up relisting everything listed. The Ubuntu Documentation Team has done some really great work on putting together the information that new users need most. I hope that once this is out, there will be less controversy with respect to the unoffical guide.

Other Cool Stuff

This is just a laundry list of stuff that for the most part isn't ready for mass consumption, but is coming down the pipe that I'm looking forward to:

Unix power for the desktop

A push to bring the more Unix-y power tools (such as conversion between formats, cron, crypto, file moving (renaming), MOTD, piping, regular expressions, etc) commonly done at a command prompt to the GNOME desktop. I think this will require heavy Nautilus intergration.

Nautilus Actions

Speaking of Nautilus intergration, this looks really cool. (And yes, they run Drupal.)

gShrooms

This isn't your normal P2P application. Check out the gShrooms screenshots.

Tilt

My laptop harddrive is wonky and doesn't deal well with being moved around. This is just a small applet to display the drive's tilt. Check out the Tilt screenshots.

iFolder

Not really something for me to use, but I know every non-power user would find this to be a killer application. Jorge Castro has iFolder working on Ubuntu.

SIOX

I'm horrible working with images, ask anyone who knows me, but I think even I could use this with the GIMP.

Really cool stuff.